Search

My Cart

Search

Author Profile

Biography

NICK ENRIGHT (1950–2003) trained for the theatre at New York University School of Arts after early experience in Australia including with Nimrod and MTC. He was an actor, director and teacher as well as a writer. His plays include
On the Wallaby, Daylight Saving, St James Infirmary, Mongrels, A Property of the Clan, The Quartet from Rigoletto, Blackrock, Good Works, Spurboard and
A Man with Five Children. With Justin Monjo he adapted Tim Winton's
Cloudstreet for the stage. He has also written for film and television, including co-writing with George Miller the screenplay for
Lorenzo's Oil which was nominated for an Oscar. He has written a number of musicals including
The Venetian Twins and
Summer Rain with composer Terence Clarke. He wrote the book for the Australian production of
The Boy From Oz. Among many awards were two Green Room Awards for Best Play, and four Gold AWGIE Awards, the 1998 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award and the NSW Premiers' Special Award.

As well as being a prolific writer, Nick was a noted acting teacher, particularly at NIDA and WAAPA.

When a young girl is murdered at the hands of one of her male contemporaries, what is the aftermath? How will her friends cope? How can such violence be understood?
A Property of the Clan deals with these issues with honesty, sensitivity and intelligence.

It’s Toby Ackland’s birthday party down near the surf club—and that should mean heaps of grog, drugs and good clean fun. But by the morning a young girl is dead—raped by three boys and bashed with a rock.

Who is responsible?

Blackrock is an intimate and strongly shaped human drama which examines the social forces behind the impulse to violence in individual lives.

Would you ruin someone's life, separate them from their soulmate and
their only son, all the time telling yourself you're doing the right
thing? Leaping back and forth between the 1920s and the 1980s,
Good Works follows
the lives of two women and their two sons as they struggle to cram
their complex lives within the narrow confines of Catholic morality. By
turns angry, incisive, tender and tragic,
Good Works is Nick Enright's most complex and most personal play.

'Enright
has fashioned an extremely complex, difficult and powerful play,
emotionally charged, intellectually challenging. It is without doubt
destined to become a major work in the Australian theatre.' Angela Bennie,
Sydney Morning Herald, 1994

'Nick
Enright's
Good Works is one of the most moving, absorbing and powerful
new plays produced in Sydney in a long time. It is an exciting work by
an experienced writer who has finally found his personal voice.'
John McCallum,
The Australian, 1994

'It
seems to me to be a play we have been waiting for for years now.
Passionate, argumentative, yet thoroughly dramatic, realist in its
concerns, yet dexterous in its use of symbolism... it is a stunning
achievement. '
Guy Rundle,
The Age, 1995

Gerry is a documentary filmmaker who, one day each year, follows five children around with a camera. The results are shown annually on television. For the children who grow up under Gerry’s (and the nation’s) watchful eyes, the experience creates its own dynamic. Are the participants his subjects, his children or his creations? Spanning more than twenty years,
A Man With Five Children invites you into a world of fractured celebrity and distorted vision.

The Nick Enright Songbook brings together fifty of the best songs from ten musicals for which Enright wrote the lyrics; and the music of five gifted composers—Terence Clarke, Glenn Henrich, Alan John, David King and Max Lambert. The book includes songs from
The Venetian Twins,
Variations,
Summer Rain,
Buckley’s!,
Orlando Rourke,
The Betrothed,
Mary Bryant,
The Good Fight,
Miracle City and
On the Wallaby.

Across this work, Enright’s characteristic use of Australian imagery and language shine brightly, intertwined with the themes of resilience, lost love and religion that are familiar in his work. Together the songs display the proficiency and craft he brought to the Australian musical theatre.

Currency Classics

A rough and tumble, lightning paced
world of street theatre and strolling players—the crowning glory of the
Commedia del’Arte tradition that so influenced Shakespeare’s comedies
and western theatrics.

Truffaldino couldn’t be happier with his change of circumstance
balancing two jobs and earning double the wage. But his ‘masters’ turn
out to be separated lovers on the run staying at the same inn. With one
disguised as a man, the wily Truffaldino tries to handle the chaos.
Hoop-la and hilarity take hold in this comedy of love gone wrong and
mistaken identity in romantic Venice. This version of the play was
produced by Bell Shakespeare—to critical acclaim—in 2003 with a return
season in 2004.

OUT OF PRINT

Nick Enright

Greg spends his spare time gazing at the stars while his brother Mitchell prefers the mud of the rodeo arena. Karen and Amy are friends with wildly different ambitions. Juggling the demands of parents, friends and their own dreams, these four teenagers learn that adulthood begins with a voyage of self-discovery.

As protesters march against the Vietnam War, boys in a Catholic school prepare for their final exams. One student paints an anti-war mural in the cadet drill hall and is forced to confront the consequences of his action.

An outback town, Boxing Day, 1945. The dust settles as the populace nurses a Christmas hangover. When Harold Slocum of Slocum’s Travelling Tent Show becomes stranded, emotions run high and the sedentary life of the town is disturbed by the remembrance of an illicit affair. In this bittersweet musical, which is at once humorous and sensitive, new life is breathed into the rural community.

This adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century comedy
The Venetian Twins quickly earned a reputation as one of the most boisterous, vibrant and irreverent works of Australian musical theatre following its initial season at the Sydney Opera House for the Nimrod Theatre Company in 1979.

Rooted firmly in
Commedia dell'arte yet unashamedly influence by Kurt Weill, Donizetti and countless others in between,
The Venetian Twins is an inspired piece of mayhem and musical pastiche.